Burgeoning Balance Suggestions

[Former user]

Burgeoning is one of the few mutations that can hurt more than it helps, and pretty much the only mutation that gets tangibly less useful the more you level it. Every time you use it its like rolling the dice, and you just have to pray that whatever it spawns wont benefit the enemy more than it benefits you.

Major Problems:

-Vantas: I'm not sure why burgeoning can even spawn these, there is literally no situation in which vantas can help the player. Enemies can see through vanta's AOE blind, the player can't, and that's about all there is to it. If burgeoning spawns a vanta, which it does really often at high levels, then you just gave your enemies a massive advantage against you.

-Aloe Fugues: It's suicidal to drop burgeoning on yourself, because of all the things that can burn, choke, electrocute, blind, and block you. But at the same time it can be equally suicidal to drop burgeoning on your enemies, because the aloe fugues doesn't give two fucks about who it copies, and will spawn a gaggle of fully geared chads to come steal your lunch money. Also in the off chance you are able to step on your own aloe fugues, good luck, you just spawned 3 clones who will spam burgeoning until every inch of the floor is covered in darkness, fire, and starapples.

-Lurking Beth/young ivory discovery. If the player discovers them, they wont stab enemies. I hope your int isn't very high.

-Dogthorn trees, shimscale mangrove trees, starapple trees, brinestalk. At low level, sure. But why at level 12 does burgeoning still spawn plants that provide no value whatsoever. Literally the only thing dogthorn trees can do is block line of sight, but it doesn't matter because the 3 vantablooms it spawned means you can't see shit anyway.

-Non combat plants: One of the really cool things about burgeoning is that you can harvest the plants you create for useful resources. Unfortunately one of the really uncool things about burgeoning is that it might just spawn a bunch of luminous hoarshrooms or yuckwheat when you really could have used some red death daccas or livid creepers. While I like the ability to harvest your own plants, it ends being a huge hindrance because you never know if it will be what you need.

-Mercurial plants: Sometimes your plants will turn against you. Not sure why or how it happens, but it's not nearly rare enough to be a non issue. Also some of your plants will just kill you in the crossfire to begin with, which I guess is fine but doesn't really help burgeoning be a more useful mutation.

-Attack delay: After being spawned, plants will often wait multiple turns before beginning to attack enemies (at which point enemies will have walked away), won't attack enemies until you attack them first, or will just sit around and be useless no matter what you do. It's really nice when they do jump on things immediately, but this is sadly the exception rather than the norm.

Suggestions:

-One of the best ways to make burgeoning good would be to allow the player to customize it similar to horns or the beak, but instead of only being able to do so when they first pick the mutation, allow them to customize it at any time. The customization options would enable/disable certain plants. This would obviously make burgeoning a lot stronger, so it would need to be balanced in some way (be it cost, cool-down, or an some added mechanic) but at the very least knowing what would come out when you cast the ability would make it so much more useful.

-Make the plant AI attack hostiles immediately, and prioritize marked targets similar to a player's allies.

-revamp the effects many of the aloe plants. When stepping on their own aloe porta, prompt them player with the option to teleport between any friendly aloe porta of their choosing. When an enemy steps on an aloe fugues, spawn a clone of them that is allied to the player. When a player steps on their own aloe volta or pyra, prevent it from electrocuting/burning them to death.

-Remove vantas, or give players heightened hearing vs any enemy in the vanta radius.

Thanks for your consideration!